Turns out that Quest has great tasting chips. Today, I had the Ranch Tortilla Chips. OMG. They were delish. 19g of protein, 4 net carbs for the whole bag. So delish. I am going to try the other flavors (one … Continue reading
Food and exercise are not the only things that will affect your weight! Loss of sleep will affect your weight too!
A report came out on a study about sleep and weight. According to the research, patients with more weekday sleep debt were 72 percent more likely to be obese when compared to participants who had no weekday sleep debt. And after six months, weekday sleep debt was significantly associated with obesity and insulin resistance. Worse yet, after 12 months, “for every 30 minutes of weekday sleep debt at baseline, the risk of obesity and insulin resistance was significantly increased by 17 percent and 39 percent, respectively.”
Diabetes and obesity are two metabolic diseases characterized by insulin resistance. These diseases can be a result of metabolic syndrome, which refers to the cluster of three or more cardio-metabolic risk factors, including insulin resistance, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Given this, the findings reinforce the existing idea that “sleep loss is additive,” and that it can negatively impact metabolism.
Don’t let your schedule run you down so that you can’t sleep. Yes, exercise is important, but if you can’t get in the sleep, then cut a bit on the exercise to get the sleep–unless you can find other things to cut back on!
It isn’t Eat, Pray Love: It is:
If you have sleep issues, have them diagnosed by a doctor. If you have sleep apnea, get help for it and if you have the breathing machine–use it. I know so many who have it and don’t use it! Besides dying in your sleep–it can cause you to be exhausted and overweight.
If you have other issues with sleep, see your doctor about meds. Start exercising, which helps sleep. Take a hot bath before bed. Make sure you have vitamin and minerals each day. Go to bed earlier. Turn off the TV, Phone, IPAD, Computer, VIdeo Games, etc. Work on it, don’t just be sleepy. If it is stress, try L-Theanine 200 mg., see a therapist and/or a doctor for meds.
EXERCISE! It will help you sleep.
Sleep will help you be skinny! And if you sleep more, you will also have more energy to exercise and eat right–other tools for weight loss!
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to make excuses for your not losing weight or keeping it off? Days come, days go and you are still waiting for the magic right moment. Or you gained a few and you are waiting to work those few off.
I certainly have had my own excuses. Here is the deal. If you want to lose weight, you have to get your butt in gear and stop the excuses. Ask yourself what you are doing to stop yourself from losing and find a way around it.
Examples:
1. “I just can’t do it.” (But, yes you can!)
2. “My body is holding onto fat and won’t lose weight.” (Go see your doctor and find out if there is a problem, not just assume it!”
3. “I don’t have time right now.” (Cut something out that you don’t have to do to find the time.)
4. “I am too stressed.” (Exercise will help your stress, and you will lose weight, so that is just an excuse because there will always be a reason to wait!)
10 Things You Can and Should Do to Lose Weight:
(Rules that skinny people follow)
1. Figure out what protein snacks you need to bring with you during the day so that you are eating small protein foods every 3-4 hours. If you let your body go without food for too long, then it goes into starvation mode and holds onto the weight longer. I bring small individual bags of nuts or low-carb protein bars.
2. Eat a breakfast every morning. In a hurry, I grab a hard-boiled egg that I buy pre-done from Costco or Trader Joes. Not in a hurry, I make some eggs with cheese in the AM. Doesn’t take long and it is filling.
3. Bring non sugary fluids with you and fill up on fluids all day long.
4. Prepare earlier the night before or on weekends to have breakfast, lunch and dinner foods and bring them with you for lunch or to work or after if you don’t have the money to eat out somewhere where you CHOOSE healthy proteins, salads and vegetables for a meal–and it has to be the right proportion of food (4 ounces of meat), handful of veggies. You can also have two small servings of fruit per day, but keep in mind that some fruits are higher in carbs (bananas) and some are lower in carbs (berries/citrus’).
5. Eat 6 small proteins per day. Eat two small servings of fruits per day and 4 small servings of vegetables per day.
6. Avoid sugar and high carbs and keep carbs down (between 50 to 100g of carbs per day).
7. Read labels of things before you eat them.
8. Exercise! Get in at least 30 minutes, 3 times per week and more if you can do it.
9. If stressed, don’t eat food, go for a walk, have a drink with no sugar/carbs. Or talk to someone.
10. Put yourself first for half an hour per day. Learn to cut down on something each day to get in the exercise. I have put off folding laundry to get in some time on the elliptical. The laundry can wait, but not your weight!
No more excuses: MOTIVATE and start now. Anytime is a great time to start!
You can lose weight by walking, hiking, doing an exercise class, job, run, bike, weight lifting….but you can also lose weight by doing things around the house–killing two birds with one stone.
Examples of simple ways to lose 150 calories, or 300 if you just double the times…..
Chores will provide a 150-calorie burn when you:
Beautify your home as you burn calories by:
Indoor chores might be tedious, but they do burn calories:
What? Sugar is an addiction worse than heroin?
Many articles have come out about how certain foods are designed to be addictive to the human brain. (One example: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2349007/Food-really-addictive-Study-finds-brain-activity-similar-heroin-users-eating-certain-processed-foods.html)
The articles basically says that studies have shown that food could be as addictive as class-A drug heroin and nicotine in cigarettes. They found substance abuse and food with a high glycemic index – such as white bread and potatoes – may trigger the same brain mechanism tied to addiction. And that eating highly processed carbohydrates can cause excess hunger and stimulate brain regions involved in reward and cravings.
No, not the Oreos!
Another study came out last week about Oreos. (One example: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/10/16/oreos-may-be-as-addictive-as-cocaine/?iid=nf-article-trend-now)
The articles about Oreos basically explain that Oreos are as addictive as cocaine with lab rats. According to the new study, eating Oreos activated more neurons in the rat brain’s “pleasure center” than drugs such as cocaine.
Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/10/16/oreos-may-be-as-addictive-as-cocaine/#ixzz2iCLeTJXs
If you read books like Salt, Sugar, Fat, by Michael Moss, http://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/1400069807, you will see how those companies learned how the brain reacted to the combination of those three items and how to “hook” their customers. Whether you like it or not, Coca Cola, General Mills and the like–are all drug pushers and you, the addicted one, are their junkee.
Here are the signs if you are a sugar junkie:
If you want to go through detox and stop being a junkie, here are some ways to do it.
Detox:
21 day Detox: http://www.rosecole.com/handouts/21DaySugarDetox.pdf
One you have detoxed, then you can really start to cut back more on carbs like Quinoa, oats, wheat, and rice–in order to lose more weight. It is hard to lose a lot of weight if you eat more than 50g ot 100g of carbs a day and those things have a lot of carbs. But, your first focus should be to DETOX and you will still lose weight because your body is obviously getting less carbs and sugar from eating less of the junk carbs. So, detox and then look at any of my other blogs on losing weight the low carb way and reaching your goal weight. (Example: https://skinny-rules.com/2013/10/18/the-rules-for-losing-weight/)
I will go into more depth on next week, in case you need a breakdown. Now, go detox! Find a friend, detox together. It is easier to do it with a friend. There is also Overeaters Anonymous meetings. Those are free and for those who can’t stop eating foods that they want to stop eating…..
I was talking with someone the other day about losing weight. They have a desire to do it, but they aren’t willing to learn new habits. They are in a rut. They need to re-learn how to eat a healthy lifestyle diet and not just eat foods for a “diet.” These people want to “nosh” on things when they are home, and they are all comfort foods: Chips, crackers, ice cream (low-fat). Their health is not as important as that need to satiate their addiction to carbs, sugar, salt and fat
Wrong Philosophy Makes You Stay Fat:
If you are eating potatoes of any kind (chips included), and you aren’t putting in any exercise, then you will not lose weight. You most likely will gain.
Some people think that if food is from Trader Joe’s, that it is good for them. However, if items have flour in them and are processed, no matter where they are from…they are not good for your diet.
Some people think that low-fat is good way to diet. I have news for you, NOPE! Read about it online. It is an advertising scam that we all fell for and that is why everyone got fat. We eat low-fat, but they replace things in food to taste good that are high in carbs to make up for it (like Fructose Corn Syrup) and that is the stuff that is making us all fat and getting diabetes.
If you read anything that Dr. Mark Hyman writes about in his Blood Sugar Solution, he talks about how you need to eat food that is fresh and covers a wide variety of colors in the rainbow–eat, not juice and drink.
Let’s look at Empty Calorie Snacks:
1. Lay’s Baked Potato Chips: 1 ounce bag or about 15 chips: 24g of carbs
2. Ruffles Potato Chips: 1 ounce bag: 15g of carbs and believe it or not, the light, no fat is more at 17g carbs.
3. Cheese Its Crackers: 29 crackers: 20g of carbs. (Reduced fat is the same)
4. Trader Joe’s Mini Cheese Sandwiches: 13 crackers: 16g of carbs
5. Trader Joe’s Multigrain Crackers: 14 crackers: 22g of carbs.
(AND THERE IS LITTLE TO NO PROTEIN in crackers, so you are eating empty calories. If you ate something good that had protein, you would be less likely to be too hungry again later and scarf your next meal. You would be better off making a turkey sandwich on whole wheat or a pita, for the same amount of carbs than to eat a bunch of white flour that does nothing but bloat you. Eating mindlessly does nothing to help your diet or your health. If you learn to have a nutritional snack between lunch and dinner and after dinner and stay away from snacking on bad foods, you will feel and look better.)
6. Dreyer’s Reduced Fat Slow-Churned Vanilla Ice Cream (12g of sugar or about 4 sugar cubes): for half a cup (have you seen how small half a cup is???): 15g of carbs. If you eat it like most people, you are probably eating 1 1/2 cups at 45g of carbs. The three main ingredients of this are all forms of sugar.
Fat doesn’t matter! THE REGULAR DREYERS is 16g per half a cup. You are NOT going to keep your weight down with the slow churned REDUCED fat ice cream.
Better Choices:
1. There is Breyers Carb Smart Vanilla ice cream and that is a better choice if you have to have ice cream. It is 4g of carbs per half cup. That is a huge difference. Less carbs means less sugar–less fat on the body.
2. A low-carb tortilla or sandwich bread protein sandwich.
3. A protein salad.
4. Western Bagel Perfect 10 Bagel at 10g of carbs per bagel. You could even melt some cheese on it! Make your sandwiches with it! (sold at Western Bagel or Westernbagel.com)
5. A low-carb protein bar or shake.
6. Two low-fat string cheese or slices
7. Low-carb Greek Yogurt and some fruit
8. Measured out nuts (look at the label on how many nuts equals how many carbs). Try to keep your snack under 15g of carbs, which is a lot, considering that if you want to lose weight, you must have between 50 and 100g of carbs per day. But, if you have most of them in this one snack, it messes up your whole day.
Eat a good protein lunch with salad and veggies so you aren’t starving before dinner and a protein snack will be enough for you until dinner time.
Try this:
(LC) A low-carbohydrate diet minimizes sugars and starches, replacing them with foods rich in protein and healthy fats.
(RF) “Real food” means choosing foods that humans had access to throughout evolution. Processed, unnatural foods with artificial chemicals are avoided.
LCRF is not a “diet.” It is a way of eating, a lifestyle change based on bulletproof scientific evidence.
For more information:
http://authoritynutrition.com/how-to-eat-healthy/
Here’s how to keep your skin looking radiant and your waistline trim.
Make sure you’re eating at the right time. Space your meals out evenly throughout the day (so don’t skip breakfast and don’t wait more than three to four hours between eating). This keeps your blood sugar stable and helps protect your skin’s collagen and elastic tissue. Stick to protein meals (eggs, meat, milk, nuts, some veggies)
For periodic breakouts, cut back on dairy products, which have been linked to acne; just be sure to get your calcium elsewhere. If you can’t break your dairy habit, reach for skim milk (even better: soy or almond milk). Almond milk is lower in carbs too.
If you suffer from rashes or redness, cut back on pickled and fermented foods (including tofu, soy sauce, sausage, and beer), as well as foods that stimulate the production of histamine (like egg whites, seafood and shellfish, and nuts). If you consistently choose face-friendly foods but you’re still struggling with breakouts, rashes, or other skin issues, another health condition may be to blame, and it may be time to make an appointment with a doctor to discuss your concerns.
Eating your way to better skin doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, eating pizza (when it’s light on the cheese, heavy on the tomato sauce, and loaded with veggies) can whip your skin into Cover Girl shape.
Fast food is not good for the skin. Sugary foods, fatty foods, fried foods and processed foods are not good for the skin.
Here is a chart of healthy skin foods: Keep portions in control, especially the carby carrots and sweet potatoes. (Remember: Two portions of veggies a day and two portions of fruits a day. 6 portions of protein a day.)
The fruit juice industry is growing year over year (and so are we!), with billions of dollars in annual revenue. I grew up on orange juice and apple juice (but I was chunky!). In recent years, trendy brands like Naked … Continue reading
The idea that a person can be addicted to food has recently gotten more support from science.
Experiments in animals and humans show that, for some people, the same reward and pleasure centers of the brain that are triggered by addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin are also activated by food, especially highly palatable foods. Highly palatable foods are foods rich in:
Sugar
Fat
Salt
The right combination of these three items causes addiction and many food companies have scientists who have figured this out and designed foods to “hook” people.
Like addictive drugs, highly palatable foods trigger feel-good brain chemicals such as dopamine. Once people experience pleasure associated with increased dopamine transmission in the brain’s reward pathway from eating certain foods, they quickly feel the need to eat again.
The reward signals from highly palatable foods may override other signals of fullness and satisfaction. As a result, people keep eating, even when they’re not hungry.
People who show signs of food addiction may also develop a tolerance to food. They eat more and more, only to find that food satisfies them less and less.
Scientists believe that food addiction may play an important role in obesity. But normal-weight people may also struggle with food addiction. Their bodies may simply be genetically programmed to better handle the extra calories they take in. Or they may increase their physical activity to compensate for overeating.
People who are addicted to food will continue to eat despite negative consequences, such as weight gain or damaged relationships. And like people who are addicted to drugs or gambling, people who are addicted to food will have trouble stopping their behavior, even if they want to or have tried many times to cut back.
Once you have managed to get through a diet, or weight loss, you will find that there are triggers that cause you to relapse and eat the wrong foods.
You will encounter triggers in the form of events, people, and subsequent emotions that will make you want to drink or get high again. What can you do in these situations?
5 ways of managing triggers during recovery from addiction:
1. Identify your personal triggers.
Everyone is different, so every recovering addict’s set of triggers will be different as well. Some common triggers are walking by a bar, seeing someone who is drunk or high, getting paid, the end of a grueling workday, getting into an argument with someone, and being bored.
2. Know what you are working with.
Triggers and cravings are a very real part of recovery. Do not try to fool yourself into thinking that they will not happen to you. Instead, know your triggers, stay open to anything that may surprise you, and have a plan for when you feel yourself being triggered.
3. Come up with and Prepare your trigger plan.
Role play, even just with yourself in the mirror, what you will do when you feel like using again. You may save yourself from a rough day, a temporary lapse, or a full relapse back to substance abuse.
4. Take care of yourself.
You can handle triggers more easily when you are eating and sleeping well, exercising, and remaining aware of your emotions.
Don’t allow yourself to be vulnerable to overbearing.
Watch out for H.A.L.T.:
Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.
These four things are said to cause more lapses and relapses.
When you are taking care of yourself you can identify when you feel any of the four, and that is when you can take action.
Act, don’t React!
The trigger may be emotionally affecting you, but you will not act on it.
If you are hungry, you will eat. Tired? Take a nap or at least rest your eyes or meditate. Lonely and angry can be a little harder to manage, but phone a friend (or your sponsor) and talk it out.
5. Do not test yourself.
If you know that walking by a donut shop is a definite trigger for you, for example, then do not knowingly walk by one to see if your recovery is as strong as you believe it to be. Maybe that time you are able to avoid going into the shop. But the seed of a trigger is planted. Something else you have not identified yet as a trigger can occur, and the combination can lead you right to a donut.
There is no need to test yourself. When you identify your current triggers, are aware of what you are working with, practice a plan, and employ good self-care, you are managing your triggers during recovery from addiction.
The claim of ‘Fat-Free’ is actually the truth in products such as Mike and Ike and Good & Plenty candies, where you’ll find the claim: “fat-free.” They’re not lying—these empty-calorie junk foods are almost 100 percent sugar and processed carbs. But the makers of such junk, calorific “food” don’t tell you that their product is loaded with sugar and are digested rapidly, sending your blood sugar soaring; as soon as it drops again, you’ll crave more “fat-free” empty calories. In fact, skimmed milk has additives that aren’t even healthy and it has carbs, which will add weight on you, if you don’t count your carbs daily and keep them at a minimum.
There are many products that claim to be fat-free, but that means little in the weight loss realm.
If you want to lose weight or maintain weight, you have to carefully read labels and consider sugar and carb content. If you have a product that has little to no fat, but is high in carbs, your weight loss will be taking a huge hit. You do want to aim at low-fat products, like low-fat cheese, but you MUST look at carb content and also look at how what is showing on the label and notice the portion size of your food product.
Misleading Labels
For example, let’s say that you are looking at a jar of peanut butter, and the label says “8g of carbs.” Sounds good, but 8g of carbs per what? Usually that covers 2 tablespoons. To says so at the top of the label.
Here is an example label, let’s say it is for cereal in a small box. Oh, the box is only “22g of carbs?” No!! Look again. It says per “cup” and there are TWO servings in the box. So, if you eat the whole thing, then it is 44g of carbs.
I see misleading labels like this all of the time. I see it on sugary drinks- even energy drinks. The bottle might say, “12g of carbs,” but two servings might be in one bottle…so double those carbs if you drink the whole thing. I am pretty wise to this trick, but every now and then a small item, which shows two portions and then the numbers gets me because the product was so small, I forgot to notice the portion size. They tricked me I to thinking the product was low on sugar and carbs.
Remember, I have between 50 and 100g of carbs per day to maintain my weight and the closer to 50g, the more I will lose. Some people can easily go over 100g, but you have to weigh daily and when you see the numbers going up, adjust accordingly on your carb intake and/or increase exercise output.
Read carefully or you won’t lose weight and you will wonder why!
Skinny-Rules 